August Wilson's bottom line

August Wilson was a playwright absorbed in his people's history; and now, of course, he himself is a part of that history (he passed away in 2005).  This melancholy fact, coupled with the knowledge that Ma Rainey's Black Bottom represents (roughly) the starting point of the playwright's life work, his ten-play saga now known as the "Century Cycle," brings a poignant emotional weight to bear on the production currently on the boards of the Huntington (but only through this weekend).

The fact that this Ma Rainey also represents the completion of the Huntington's own commitment to staging Wilson's entire cycle only seems to up the artistic ante.  Watching the close of this production is like watching the curtain of time descend on ten different plays and nearly twenty-six years of effort (the theatre staged its first Wilson play, Lloyd Richards' production of Joe Turner's Come and Gone, in 1986; I remember it well, but were some of the stars of the current show even born then?).

So let's just say that watching this new version of Ma Rainey put me in mind of what my father used to call the Long View - and it also re-enforces the impression that at the end of vast artistic endeavors, you sometimes end up precisely where you started.  That is if you haven't actually lost some ground.  For has anyone come along to take up August Wilson's mantle?  Do we have a young black playwright - or a young playwright of any color or gender - of Wilson's size, scope, or sympathy?

Oh, let's be honest - we don't [although local playwright Kirsten Greenidge will take her shot next week with Luck of the Irish].  I don't mean to make exorbitant claims for Wilson; the familiar rap against him is one I agree with (in fact it's one I've helped shape): he was never much for structure, perhaps not even for story, particularly as he aged; his plays became ever more digressive and discursive; in some of the late ones, in fact, all you can count on are a few stretches of spectacular oratory.  Since Ma Rainey is at or near the beginning of this arc, it's more coherent than some of the cycle - which probably peaks in the middle  period of Joe Turner and The Piano Lesson - but you can feel here, at the very beginning, the buds of the flaws that would eventually fully flower by the cycle's end.


Still, in that mysterious way that a great dramatic voice somehow makes itself known despite its own failings, in Ma Rainey, Wilson's writing slowly coalesces into a deeply moving statement.  The play has little forward drive, it's true - it's a meandering look at a group of black musicians conjured around the real-life "Ma Rainey," (who did have a hit with the song "Black Bottom" - although she only had supporting vocals on the record - and was a notable figure in gay history as well as black history due to her open lesbianism, which Wilson treats matter-of-factly).  Ma and her long-suffering band are attempting to make a blues record for a white recording company, although this proves a daunting task, given the demands of the recording studio and Ma's own penchant for drama.  Thus the play is a tapestry of racist humiliations, large and small, as well as private conversations and debates, petty power plays and exploitations - and one shocking outburst of violence.  But remember Stephen Dedalus' conceited claim that "in the smithy of his soul" he would forge "the uncreated conscience of his race"?  Well, August Wilson seems to have gone Joyce one better, I'd argue.  For from the panoply of voices arguing in Ma Rainey, a mosaic of communal frustration and consternation does slowly emerge; a vision of a race unshackled, but still in chains, and furious at both its oppressors and itself for its desperate condition.  Yes, the title of the play is a naughty double entendre, but it's a deeper pun as well - what exactly, August Wilson asks, is the bottom line for my race, my people?

Jason Bowen in a break-out performance .

And it's here, I think, that the playwright towers over today's polemicists in the ongoing wars of identity politics.  His characters struggle not only with their victimization but also with their seeming impotence before it; they interrogate themselves as well as the power structure.  This, of course, is terribly incorrect to today's P.C. mandarins; but it's one of the means by which Wilson transcends politics and achieves the status of art instead.

I'm not sure, actually, that the current production always understands that - well, I'm sure the actors do; but director Liesl Tommy has framed the action with odd flourishes, in which rap blares from the sound system, and the cast briefly stares at us in contemporary dress.  I wasn't sure how to take these asides - but of course what leaps out at you from them is how black music - like the rest of pop music! - has collapsed catastrophically in quality, falling from the free, sweet lyricism of jazz, gospel and the blues to our current modes of squalid crudeness.  In a way, of course, Wilson predicted this; his characters muse that as racist power structures harden and age, the resulting anger from the black community will slowly poison, even strangle, our popular culture.  So perhaps Tommy intends her framing as mournful acknowledgment of Wilson's prescience - I don't know.

But I don't feel that elsewhere Tommy has cast Wilson in the best light possible - even though in its richness and maturity this production marks a return to form for the Huntington (after two recent misfires).  Still, here we feel the clunk of just about every bump in Wilson's script (when a director like Lloyd Richards might have disguised the smaller gaps - maybe Tommy's not all that great at structure either).  The director's most troubling misstep is her seeming lack of attention to the slowly burning fuse that does, eventually, ignite at the play's conclusion.  But she has drawn highly detailed performances from almost everyone in her superb cast, and she has coaxed a star turn from our own Jason Bowen, who here joins the ranks of local actors who have made the jump from local stages to the big time in a splashily convincing way (another reason why the Huntington is our leading theatre, and remains so valuable).

And those performances are reason enough to catch Ma Rainey before it closes.  Yvette Freeman makes a formidable Ma - she perfectly captures the mix of resentment, defeated realism, and diva-worthy theatrics that Wilson intends; and though she doesn't sing in quite the cadence of her historical namesake, she still lights up "Black Bottom" with a frisky, earthy joy.  (The music here, though synched to taped performances, is highly convincing.) And while Jason Bowen may provide the fireworks for the musicians' backstage scenes, he never obscures the fine detail of the performances around him, from the distinguished trio of G. Valmont Thomas, Charles Weldon, and Glenn Turner.  Newcomers Joneice Abott-Pratt and Corey Allen likewise shine as very different members of Ma's entourage - one her slinky latest squeeze, the other a stammering nephew who Ma poignantly insists (with some raw symbolism) deserves a place on her record.  Meanwhile, as the racist record producer Sturdyvant, Thomas Derrah all but disappears into his role, and made me completely forget about his recent preening in Red.  I was surprised that only Will LeBow seemed to lack specificity as Ma's manager Irvin; he was adequate, but there is, I think, far more to this role than he has yet found (at least by opening night).  But overall, there's a richness to this ensemble that you won't find anywhere else in town right now.

So if you can't tell, I left Ma Rainey's Black Bottom once again moved by August Wilson's achievement.  I certainly hope this final installment of the "Century Cycle" won't be the Huntington's farewell to this great playwright - because frankly I think we need him now more than ever.

Glenn Turner, Will LeBow, G. Valmont Thomas, Jason Bowen, and Charles Weldon await Ma Rainey.

The Huntington swings for August Wilson's Fences . . .

John Beasley as Troy Maxson in August Wilson's Fences.

. . . but doesn't quite connect in its new production of this much-lauded Pulitzer Prize-winner. Not that you're going to get that critique from the print critics, who know only too well that criticizing Wilson carries with it a certain - how to put this - racial charge (just ask Bob Brustein). Add to that the Huntington's new penchant for launching pogroms against its reviewers, and you may sense the interesting level of critical insulation this theatre has recently achieved.

Still, no more insulation, you could argue, than Brustein himself had for the A.R.T., with its Harvard/New Republic connections. And at any rate, the fact that many critics will inevitably hail Fences as a "masterpiece" will still be okay, because the play is certainly worthy, and the production is often pretty good (and features one great performance, from Crystal Fox). It's also wonderful to see the Huntington return to some level of seriousness after last spring's multiplex-friendly follies like Pirates! and that anal commedia thing.

Still, as we gain more historical perspective on August Wilson (who died in 2005), can we not also begin to gain some critical perspective? Mr. Wilson devoted his creative life to examining African-American history in the twentieth century, and his comprehension of the theatrical dimensions of that subject was breathtaking. And in its way unsparing. Fences, for example, is a laudable attempt at balancing the legacy of this country's racism with a vision of a flawed hero who is responsible, to some degree, for his own ongoing oppression. Indeed, the play is set right at the cusp of the civil rights movement - 1957, the year the Little Rock high schools were integrated - but its greatest dramatic questions hang on whether its characters will be able to take advantage of their new opportunities.

Now this kind of thematic material is, I think, basically taboo for white dramatists (and appropriately so); and this is part of what makes Wilson so valuable - his work is actually not about the injustice of racist oppression, but rather about how African-Americans responded within their own community to their terrible situation. Indeed, in Fences Wilson doesn't even bother bringing white people onstage; their abuse of their power is taken for granted, it simply isn't what he's writing about. So I wonder if the playwright would agree with the white Globe reviewer who opined that the hero of Fences has been left "with a permanently wounded self, and . . . will eventually inflict so many wounds on his wife and son that he will virtually tear his family apart." Or rather I wonder whether the playwright wouldn't perceive that statement as an elision of his central question, which is whether his hero, the unfulfilled baseball player Troy Maxson, could have transcended his wounds - and precisely how much responsibility he bears for the havoc he wreaks on his family. In short, is Troy Maxson a hero - or an anti-hero? And what happens to a dream deferred when it is deferred again by its own dreamer?

The Huntington production answers these queries with a moving, but not entirely convincing, blast of light from Heaven at its finish. But the question still lingers, perhaps because it's one of the great dramatic questions - essentially a variant on the great tragic question. And it's certainly true that Wilson perceived the depth of the issues he was grappling with, and often evoked them beautifully in stand-alone speeches. Indeed, the playwright understood perfectly every emasculating humiliation that the white establishment had visited on his hero (Maxson has been reduced to collecting garbage), and how these experiences funneled inevitably into the social and sexual issues plaguing so many African-American families. 

But truth be told, Wilson rarely managed to embed these insights in satisfying dramatic action. Fences has more structure than some Wilson plays, but its action often pokes awkwardly out of the dialogue (which is sometimes between the hero and himself). And the drama is studded with obvious symbols - a fence slowly rising around Maxson's home, a fantasy baseball made of rags - that feel applied to the play rather than integrated into it. (The very solid and convincing set, by Marjorie Bradley Kellogg, is below.)


John Beasley and Eugene Lee hang out on a seeming actual chunk of Pittsburgh.

Still, even without the mysterious resonance of genuine dramatic metaphor, Fences could be compelling as oration, as many of its speeches are powerful and complex (in a way, Wilson often strikes me as more of a stage preacher-man than a playwright). But in this long, demanding, sometimes-nearly-solo turn, John Beasley impresses with a strong natural presence, but his performance lacks the kind of modulation, development, and build that might hold us transfixed through his decline and fall. And on opening night Mr. Beasley stumbled several times over lines and stage business, at least once giving the sense that he had lost his place in the play. Thus the production feels repetitive, and sometimes even stop-and-go, despite the efforts of a sterling supporting cast.

Although those supporting performances may be worth the price of admission all on their own. Crystal Fox (at left) brings award-worthy strength and subdued fire to the role of Maxson's long-suffering wife, Rose, and as best buddy Bono, Eugene Lee is just about pitch-perfect.

There's likewise spirited work from Warner Miller as son Cory - who realizes he must defy his father to realize the dreams he can now see on the horizon - as well as a haunting turn from Bill Nunn, as the damaged brother who now believes he's the angel Gabriel.

All these actors seem to know precisely what they're doing, and no doubt have benefited from director Kenny Leon's individual attention, but their efforts to raise the stakes as the production progresses are of little avail. As Mr. Beasley further internalizes his role, and manages to convey the impression of a man sinking beneath a welter of contradictions, Fences may indeed fly out of the park.

 But not until then.